Data Mining for Business (UMD)

Data Mining for Business is an MBA-level 15-week elective course. The course covers data mining techniques and their use in strategic business decision making. This is a hands-on course that provides an understanding of the key methods of data visualization, exploration, classification, prediction, time series forecasting, and clustering. We use neat software such as Spotfire, XLMiner and Spotfire Miner, and the textbook Data Mining for Business Intelligence. See more details a past course syllabus.

Many past students say this is one of the best courses they took during their MBA, and that it has directly assisted them in job hunting and in their actual jobs.

During the semester-long course, students work in teams on solving a business problem of their choice, using data mining tools and applying them to real data. Click here to view presentations and brief reports for some of the projects.

Course veterans can join the LinkedIn Group. You're also welcome to visit my blog on Business and Statistics.

Instructors of data mining courses in business schools are welcome to join the BZST teaching forum for resource sharing.

Smith students recommend combining "Data Mining for Business" with the following courses:

  • Financial Statements Analysis (BUAC 758Z or 743): "Some of the Data Mining techniques really aligned well with my assignments in BUAC758Z... For example, the goal of our final team project was to determine whether we should invest in certain companies based on the corporation's previous financial statements and overall industry averages, and then to predict on how well the company would perform in future quarters."
  • Pricing and Revenue Management (BUDT775): "If you're liking BUDT733 [Data Mining for Business], you'll like BUDT775."
  • Marketing Analysis (BUMK706): "both courses go well if one is interested in pursuing the analytics based career. BUMK 706 applies some of the data mining techniques to specific marketing problems... I would recommend taking Data mining course first and then BUMK 706. Data mining is a strong foundational course which is application/domain agnostic. With the solid base in data mining one can dive deeper into marketing oriented issues by taking the BUMK 706."

 

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PDF icon Syllabus (Fall 2009 DC)110.08 KB

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